Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Digital Dreams & Electric Sheep

UK based artist Memo Akten has trained machine learning algorithms on tens of thousands of paintings in the Google Art Project. He then presented his machine learning algorithms with a virtual paintbrush and canvas to see what they could create for themselves. You can view the results in Learning to Dream, a gallery of 24 works of art created by Memo's generative adversarial network.

The gallery uses the Leaflet mapping platform to create an interface which allows you to zoom in and pan around each of the computer generated works of art. I can't tell you much about the generative adversarial network used to create the artworks but I can tell you a little bit about how they were mapped. Each separate high resolution image was cut into map tiles. If you want to create your own map tiles to use with Leaflet Zoomable Images with Leaflet provides a very detailed tutorial explaining how you can use GDAL2Tiles and MapTiler to render map tiles from an image and use them with the Leaflet mapping platform.

Another option is to use Zoomify to create your map tiles. Showing Zoomify Images with Leaflet explains how to do this and even includes a Leaflet plugin to add the tiles to your Leaflet map.